New ComicConnect Tool to Redefine the Comic Market?
This week, ComicConnect.com unveiled a “beta” version of a new tool that’s available free to the site’s members. It’s called the “Bounty Hunt” and is being touted as something that could redefine the very nature of how comic books are bought and sold. The feature's three main attributes are as follows:
The ComicConnect Bounty Hunt allows comic collectors and dealers a proactive way to accurately communicate what they are looking to buy and how much they are willing to pay, aka the bounty.
The tool empowers collectors and dealers by giving them a role in dictating prices and making markets. This is perhaps a better approach than allowing auctions and dealers to dictate prices to them.
With a sufficient volume of bounties, this feature may very well be a new type of forward-looking de-facto price guide for comics. To date, sellers must rely solely upon looking back at prices realized of the past, and incorporate what may be outdated info. The ComicConnect Bounty Hunt helps paint a fuller picture, by adding real-time pricing to valuation.
“On the one hand, we have customers constantly giving us lists with pay prices for really tough books. They’re willing to pay the most for being offered the very best,” stated ComicConnect staffer Ben Smith. “On the other hand, our company has relationships dating back over 25 years with collectors who actually have these prized books, but keep it to themselves and don’t necessarily want to put them up on the auction block just to find out what they’re worth.”
The challenge was a find a way to connect the two groups.
The answer, according to ComicConnect, was to automate the process, and give the membership an easy-to-use feature for them to post what they would pay for certain comic issues in specific grades. Eureka!
John Ciba, comic dealer and seller on ComicConnect, had this to add:
"I think Bounty Hunt is a great feature. Whenever I see a matching bounty for a comic book I own, at a price I'm willing to accept, it's practically a done deal and easy money in my pocket. Bounty Hunt has the potential to be a real time saver, and very useful for dealers like myself."
ComicConnect calls the feature a “beta,” because they’re inviting feedback from the members on how to make it better. Right now, the feature is available for anyone with a free ComicConnect membership to use.
“Some of the old timers in the hobby may recall the days when we all used to post classifieds in industry press with pay prices… an informal and friendly competition in which each issue, one tried to outdo the other from the previous edition,” fondly recalls Stephen Fishler, ComicConnect cofounder. “There we were, competing over comics that had yet to even materialize… but we all know that they would turn up, and deals would happen because of those ads. In a way, the Bounty Hunt reminds me of a 21st Century version of that same dynamic — but now as a service to the community where every collector and dealer can get the word out about the comics they seek and the prices they are willing to pay.”
This is a guest article. The thoughts and opinions in this piece are those of their author and are not necessarily the thoughts of the Certified Collectibles Group.
